I was sitting in my home office about 6 months ago, thinking the same thing. Telling myself... naaah, I ain't going with Windows 7... no need. Silly me. Upgraded to Vegas 9, figured I may as well prep to upgrade to Windows 7 while I'm at it, and I realized I needed more speed for the huge project I've been working on. Okay, a simple processor upgrade to i7 should get me ready. Oh, I need a new motherboard too? What's that you say, my current RAM is useless? And all my PCI cards?

Suddenly a simple preparation for Windows 7 of $99 just cost me about $1200. Okay, now I don't need anything else. What's that... a price drop in Blu-Ray burners? I could use one of those....

"Is this merely a sign of age, am I about to die of boredom" mmmmmm.......... just call it wisdom........ boredom opens the door to major "honey to-do lists" and other things like political thinktanks, playing Russia Roulette, golfing with people that owe you money or will, working in soupkitchens for under employed movie directors and bank executives........

Still sitting on XP Pro, P4 3.2. I do have another dual core AMD with a fresh XP install.

I HATE vista, what I have works, and is stable.

Sure I have the occasional 60 hour renders, but they complete just fine.

I will be upgrading to 7 on new machines in the near future.

You have an i7 and you need a MB upgrade already? Spooky.

Fldave,
I didn't need the new motherboard after the i7, the i7 required the new motherboard. And it's not like I had an old one either... I had just upgraded it less than two years ago. Then, the new motherboards don't even accept the DDR2 RAM.

I didn't mind the 2-3 day renders sometimes, but then when the client wanted a slight revision, or there was a slight jump that I didn't notice at 46:23 in the timeline, I had to redo the render again, etc., etc. Looking forward to much shorter renders.

Posted by: musicvid
Date: 9/17/2009 3:14:09 PM

I first got my feet wet in this PC "thing" fifteen years ago this month, when I was asked to help "upgrade" a bunch of school computers from DOS 6.2 to Windows (for Workgroups) 3.11. I started learning hardware upgrades by assuming that a given cable or card would only plug in one way, and proceeding from there.

Now, finally, after having gone through 95a and b, 98 and SE, XP and SP2, and now Vista, I can finally breath a sigh of great relief and say that, as of this evening, everything is working right. All my software, externals, video apps, printers and servers, and looking through the latest sale flyer from the local computer store, I can honestly say there is nothing more I "need."

Is this merely a sign of age, am I about to die of boredom, or should I purposely break something to create yet another challenge for tomorrow?


LINUX! You're never to old to learn a new Linux Distribution (distro)! So many distros so little time. ((: Most of these smaller distros run well on old computers so you dont have to retire them to the closet. Just use them for dedicated web surfing machines.

I personally use Fedora Core 10 (Redhat), and Puppy. Played around with Damn Small Linux (DSL), Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD (OSX is based on) but prefer Fedora.

If you want to do something a little different with your desktop, Fluxbox (google it for some samples) has some pretty nice desktops. I mainly keep up with this stuff to keep my brain challenged and learning new things since the world of Linux changes faster than Windows IMHO.


I am truly perplexed and stymied by not having a single "critical" issue to dominate my life -- did I somehow wish too hard?

Linux can help you out here as well. (: